I swear I’m gonna plug an LLM into a rather traditional solver I’m writing. I may tuck deep into the paper a point how it’s quite slow to use an LLM to mutate solutions in a genetic algorithm or a swarm solver. And in any case non LLM would be default.

Normally I wouldn’t sink that low but I got mouths to feed, and frankly, fuck it, they can persist in this madness for much longer than I can stay solvent.

This is as if there was a mass delusion that a pseudorandom number generator can serve as an oracle, predicting the future. Doing any kind of Monte Carlo simulation of something like weather in that world would of course confirm all the dumb shit.

Yeah plenty of opportunities to just work it into the story.

I dunno what kind of local models you can use, though. If it is a 3D game then its fine to require a GPU, but you wouldn’t want to raise minimum requirements too high. And you wouldn’t want to use 12 gigs of vram for a gimmick, either.

I think it could work as a minor gimmick, like terminal hacking minigame in fallout. You have to convince the LLM to tell you the password, or you get to talk to a demented robot whose brain was fried by radiation exposure, or the like. Relatively inconsequential stuff like being able to talk your way through or just shoot your way through.

Unfortunately this shit is too slow and too huge to embed a local copy of, into a game. You need a lot of hardware compatibility. And running it in the cloud would cost too much.

I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:

It doesn’t even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isn’t plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldn’t do.

All joking aside, there is something thoroughly fucked up about this.

What’s fucked up is that we let these rich fucks threaten us with extinction to boost their stock prices.

Imagine if some cold fusion scammer was permitted to gleefully boast that his experimental cold fusion plant in the middle of a major city could blow it up. Setting up little hydrogen explosions, setting up a neutron source just to make it spicier, etc.

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

Exactly. Even if you ensure the cited cases or articles are real it will misrepresent what said articles say.

Fundamentally it is just blah blah blah ing until the point comes when a citation would be likely to appear, then it blah blah blahs the citation based on the preceding text that it just made up. It plain should not be producing real citations. That it can produce real citations is deeply at odds with it being able to pretend at reasoning, for example.

Ensuring the citation is real, RAG-ing the articles in there, having AI rewrite drafts, none of these hacks do anything to address any of the underlying problems.

Yeah. I’d love to see the prompt, gab’s nazi ai prompt was utterly pathetic and this one got to be pretty bad as well.

Actually, having read it carefully, it is interesting that they actually don’t claim it was hacked, they claim that the modification was unauthorized. They also don’t claim that they removed the access from that mysterious “employee” who modified it. I’m thinking they had some legal reason to technically not lie.

Yeah, exactly. There’s no trick to it at all, unlike the original puzzle.

I also tested OpenAI’s offerings a few months back with similarly nonsensical results: https://awful.systems/post/1769506

All-vegetables no duck variant is solved correctly now, but I doubt it is due to improved reasoning as such, I think they may have augmented the training data with some variants of the river crossing. The river crossing is one of the top most known puzzles, and various people have been posting hilarious bot failures with variants of it. So it wouldn’t be unexpected that their training data augmentation has river crossing variants.

Of course, there’s very many ways in which the puzzle can be modified, and their augmentation would only cover obvious stuff like variation on what items can be left with what items or spots on the boat.

Full time AI grift jobs would of course be forever closed to any AI whistleblower. There’s still a plenty of other jobs.

I did participate in the hiring process, I can tell you that at your typical huge corporation the recruiter / HR are too inept to notice that you are a whistleblower, and don’t give a shit anyway. And of the rank and file who will actually google you, plenty enough people dislike AI.

At the rank and file level, the only folks who actually give a shit who you are are people who will have to work with you. Not the background check provider, not the recruiter.

but often the video isn’t clear or fine quality enough

Wouldn’t it be great if 100x the effort that didn’t go into making the video clear or fine quality enough, instead didn’t go into making relevant flying, see-through overlay decals?

Ultimately the reason it looks cool is that you’re comparing a situation of little effort being put into repair related documentation, to some movie scenario where 20 person-hours were spent making a 20-second repair fragment whereby 1 step of a repair is done.

I’m not sure it’s actually being used, beyond C suite wanting something cool to happen and pretending it did happen.

Exactly. It goes something like "remember when you were fixing a washing machine and you didn’t know what some part was and there was no good guide for fixing it, no schematic, no nothing? Wouldn’t it be awesome if 100x of the work that wasn’t put into making documentation was not put into making VR overlays?

Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?

If only, it’s not even that! Neither Boltzmann machines nor Hopfield networks led to anything used in the modern spam and deepfake generating AI, nor in image recognition AI, or the like. This is the kind of stuff that struggles to get above 60% accuracy on MNIST (hand written digits).

Hinton went on to do some different stuff based on backpropagation and gradient descent, on newer computers than those who came up with it long before him, and so he got Turing Award for that, and it’s a wee bit controversial because of the whole “people doing it before, but on worse computers, and so they didn’t get any award” thing, but at least it is for work that is on the path leading to modern AI and not for work that is part of the vast list of things that just didn’t work and it’s extremely hard to explain why you would even think they would work in the first place.

I seriously wonder, do any of the folks with the “AR glasses to assist repair” thing ever actually repair anything, or do they get their ideas of how you repair stuff from computer games?

Nobel prize in Physics for attempting to use physics in AI but it didn’t really work very well and then one of the guys working on a better more pure mathematics approach that actually worked and got the Turing Award for the latter, but that’s not what the prize is for, while the other guy did some other work, but that is not what the prize is for. AI will solve all physics!!!111

AI peddlers just love any “critique” that presumes the AI is great at something.

Safety concern that LLMs would go Skynet? Say no more, I hear you and I’ll bring it up first thing in the Congress.

Safety concern that terrorists might use it to make bombs? Say no more! I agree that the AI is so great for making bombs! We’ll restrict it to keep people safe!

It sounds too horny, you say? Yeah, good point, I love it. Our technology is better than sex itself! We’ll keep it SFW to keep mankind from going extinct due to robosexuality!

I love the “criti-hype”. AI peddlers absolutely love any concerns that imply that the AI is really good at something.

Safety concern that LLMs would go Skynet? Say no more, I hear you and I’ll bring it up in the congress!

Safety concern that terrorists might use it to make bombs? Say no more! I agree that the AI is so great for making bombs! We’ll restrict it to keep people safe!

Sexual roleplay? Yeah, good point, I love it. Our technology is better than sex itself! We’ll restrict it to keep mankind from falling into the sin of robosexuality and going extinct! I mean, of course, you can’t restrict something like that, but we’ll try, at least until we release a hornybot.

But any concern about language modeling being fundamentally not the right tool for some job (Do you want to cite a paper or do you want to sample from the underlying probability distribution?), hey hey hows about we talk about the skynet thing instead?

It used to mean things like false positives in computer vision, where it is sort of appropriate: the AI is seeing something that’s not there.

Then the machine translation people started misusing the term when their software mistranslated by adding something that was not present in the original text. They may have been already trying to be misleading with this term, because “hallucination” implies that the error happens when parsing the input text - which distracts from a very real concern about the possibility that what was added was being plagiarized from the training dataset (which carries risk of IP contamination).

Now, what’s happening is that language models are very often a very wrong tool for the job. When you want to cite a court case as a precedent, you want a court case that actually existed - not a sample from the underlying probability distribution of possible court cases! LLM peddlers don’t want to ever admit that an LLM is the wrong tool for that job, so instead they pretend that it is the right tool that, alas, sometimes “hallucinates”.

YOU CAN DO THAT WITHOUT AI.

Can they, though? Sure, in theory Google could hire millions of people to write overviews that are equally idiotic, but obviously that is not something they would actually do.

I think there’s an underlying ethical theory at play here, which goes something like: it is fine to fill internet with half-plagiarized nonsense, as long as nobody dies, or at least, as long as Google can’t be culpable.